Three Years of Full-Scale War: How Studying Ukraine Can Change Gender Studies

This lecture, by Professor of Political Science Janet Elise Johnson, is a moment to reflect on the third-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and to consider how studying Eastern Europe can change gender studies, including giving us insight into today’s other turmoils. Over the last four decades, gender studies has been transformed, moving from mostly the study of the West to taking the rest of the world seriously. Yet, still often invisible is this part of the world, the site of much mass violence, decades of state socialism, and one of the first places to be subsumed by right-wing anti-genderism.

Johnson is the Endowed Chair in Women’s and Gender Studies, 2023–25, and professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on gender, feminist activism, corruption, authoritarianism, and gendered violence in Russia and Ukraine. Her most recent book, The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (co-edited with Katalin Fábián and Mara Lazda, 2022), won the 2022 Heldt Prize for the best book from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. Since 2008, she has been one of the coordinators of a monthly workshop on gender and transformation in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia, now based at the CUNY Graduate Center.